County View: Revising regional policies

Friday

Aug 11, 2017 at 3:01 AM

By E.J. Albright

This week’s column reports on activities at the Cape Cod Commission, whose representatives have spent the past several weeks updating county elected officials as to what it has been doing and accomplishing.

Over the next few weeks during the dog days of summer, this column will report on those updates.

One of the duties of county elected officials is to review and ratify the Cape Cod Commission's Regional Policy Plan. At a meeting last week, Deputy Director of the Commission Kristy Senatori walked the Assembly of Delegates through what they can expect.

The commission, which is Cape Cod's regional planning agency, regularly updates the Regional Policy Plan, a comprehensive planning and regulatory document that guides reviews of "developments of regional impact" or DRIs.

In the update, currently under way, she said, “We really are focusing on four major issues.

Housing. "Not just affordable housing, but housing for all life stages," said Senatori. "Cape Cod has a predominance of single family homes, she said. "We're not accommodating all the people who would like to live and work on the Cape. How can we expand that housing stock to accommodate all life stages?"

Infrastructure. "How can we have a more coordinated approach to infrastructure, whether it's wastewater, transportation, and how can we use the best available data and information that we have to make better decisions locally?" Senatori asked.

The Cape Cod Commission Act has charged the commission "with guiding the rate and location of development as long as it has the appropriate infrastructure, so how can we better do that through our Regional Policy Plan?" she said.

Local comprehensive planning process. "How can we help towns through our Regional Policy Plan to change zoning to better implement the vision on the local and regional levels and actually provide more predictability for developers," she said.

Regulation. As in streamlining regulations. "We've spent a lot of time over the last several months defining and determining activity centers across the Cape," Senatori said. By that she means areas "where there is already community and business activity but also where increased density would be appropriate."

For example, if an area has adequate infrastructure in place to accommodate growth and if there is municipal investment in place, "these are areas where streamlining regulations makes sense."

If you can't measure you can't manage

"At the same time we need to measure how we're doing," Senatori said. Her team is looking at the stated goals of the Cape Cod Commission Act and the current Regional Policy Plan and identifying ways to determine "how well have we done in meeting those goals."

Furthermore, can the commission measure its impact in meeting the goals and determine new and better ways to meet them. "We're coming up with these measures and metrics so we can, several years down the road, take a look how these policies we will be implementing have worked."

Finally, from a process perspective, commission staff and outside stakeholder groups have been methodically working for several months to review all the regulations in the regional policy plan, asking questions such as "Is the 10,000-square-foot threshold – the rule stating that any building greater than that size requires a Cape Cod Commission review -- working everywhere or should the commission "be looking to revise that threshold in certain areas across the Cape?'" Senatori said.